- “Overlooked No More: Melitta Bentz, Who Invented the Coffee Filter” provides a fascinating account of the woman behind our modern-day coffee-making routine. Frustrated with grounds in her coffee and with messy clean-up, Melitta’s solution involved blotting paper from her son’s school bag. The patent for her novel filter was awarded in 1908, and, according to the New York Times, “Today the Melitta Group employs more than 4,000 people across the world. The company reported its revenue in 2017 as 1.5 billion euros, or about $1.8 billion.”
- From “Staying Alive” in Upstream: Selected Essays by Pulitzer-Prize–winning poet Mary Oliver, whose birthday is this month:
“I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned: that the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.”
- “Liftoff,” the photo by Joe Marino selected by National Geographic for its Photo of the Day, is aptly described by photographer Tammy Neufeld: “This is such a beautiful shot of a stark landscape and a technical subject moved into a poem of light and movement.”
